First Star, Worst Star: February 22, 2015

FIRST STAR

Who could have predicted that this 8 year old wood shop teacher would grow up to haunt the dreams of Oiler fans for years to come?

After an absolutely atrocious season last year that saw him post career low numbers, be traded twice and bounce around between the NHL and the minors, Devan Dubnyk is back with a vengeance!

Since being traded to the Wild on January 15th, Dubnyk has put up a sparkling 12-2-1 record including FIVE(!!!) shutouts, bringing his totals on the year to 21-7-3 with a 2.20 GAA (5th best in the league) and a .925 SV% (4th best). At this point if the Wild make the playoffs he will be one of the biggest contributing factors, if not THE biggest.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a guy go from “He’ll never play in the NHL again”** to “he could get some serious consideration for the Vezina” in less than a calendar year. Goalies: making less sense to me than women since forever and always!

And for Oiler fans, we get to sit back and enjoy the fruits of the “drafted and developed a player and then sent him on his way for another team to reap the benefits of his prime playing years and ability” system the Oilers have perfected over the last decade.

**Which, for the record, I always thought was insane. HE HAD ONE BAD SEASON ON THE WORST TEAM IN THE LEAGUE! Jeeze!

WORST STAR

Morgan Riley said a dumb thing on Friday. This caused Twitter’s outrage machine to hit peak capacity, which caused seemingly well adjusted people to react as if Morgan Riley had committed a crime against humanity. THAT, in turn, caused the “WE’RE NERFING THE WORLD CAN’T EVEN SAY A MISOGYNISTIC THING ANYMORE WITHOUT THE PC POLICE KICKING YOUR DOOR DOWN TO TAKE ERR GUNS AND ERR JAYBS” people to come out of their caves to argue with the righteously offended, and the whole thing just caused me to have a mediocre Friday afternoon. So THANKS everyone!

Everything about it was dumb from top to bottom, and mostly I just wish we’d stop holding up 20 year old kids as the supposed bastion of our morals. We’ve all said stuff in our lives that we look back on embarrassingly, and just because a kid is really good at hockey and has a microphone shoved in his face doesn’t mean we should take anything he says any more or less seriously than we would your average, shitty 20 year old dude.

TL;DR: Hockey players, knock off the misogyny. People in general, stop overreacting to everything all the time. THAAAAAANKS!

Marc-Andre Fleury is having an unbelievable postseason. His current Sv% of .947 doesn’t just lead all goalies in these playoffs, it’s actually the highest Sv% of any goalie in a playoff year since the 1960s (min 8 games) …with one important caveat: he has one round yet to play. I think the biggest question heading into the…